


I've Got No Illusions About You (and Guess What, I Never Did)

by speccygeekgrrl



Category: Mystery Science Theater 3000
Genre: Awkward Kissing, Awkward Romance, But literally the first five minutes of season 12, Canon Compliant, Cunnilingus, F/M, Fate & Destiny, First Time, Go watch the last 10 minutes of the episode and then read this I'm serious, Kinga is a lying liar who lies, Literally right after At the Earth's Core, Post Season 11, Season 12 spoilers, Tickling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-28
Updated: 2018-11-28
Packaged: 2019-09-01 15:44:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,154
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16768096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/speccygeekgrrl/pseuds/speccygeekgrrl
Summary: "After you got eaten, Kinga and I had our best talk ever. We realized everything had to change. And... we hooked up.""Ew. No! No, no, no, we did not."Kinga Forrester is a fucking liar and a bad one at that. She doesn't need to own up to Jonah and the bots about what happened between her and Max for it to be what happened. They both know the truth.





	I've Got No Illusions About You (and Guess What, I Never Did)

**Author's Note:**

> *continues to dance around like a madwoman* MY SHIP IS CANON MY SHIP IS CANON MY SHIP IS CANON AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH
> 
> I wrote this whole thing in 12 straight hours. I uhhhhhhh might have a problem. But hey, it's NaNoWriMo, I can excuse this kind of shenanigans.

Max had a whole idea of how interrupting Kinga's wedding would play out. The end of his plan had been Kinga marrying him instead of Jonah. That... obviously didn't go like he thought it would. He was surprised by how _nauseous_ being responsible for Jonah's death made him feel. Wasn't killing someone supposed to make you feel powerful? Max didn't feel powerful. He felt regretful. It hadn't been Jonah's fault that Kinga had fixated on him, and now he was gone, and Max was sad about it.

Everyone left in a hurry when the wedding was ruined, and Max wandered the halls feeling restless and melancholy and very, very scared about what Kinga was going to do to him the next time she laid eyes on him. And yet, still, somehow, his stupid second banana instinct kicked in more strongly than his perfectly reasonable fear for his life: Kinga was upset, so he should try to comfort her, even though he was the one who'd made her upset.

He knocked softly at the door to her quarters, not sure if he wanted her to be there or not, but she opened the door too quickly for him to turn away. Her mascara had streaked down her flushed cheeks with what he could only assume were furious tears, and she'd taken down her hair and ditched the purple veil.

"What do you want?" she snapped.

"I just wanted to make sure you were okay," he said awkwardly, and she rolled her eyes and stepped back from the door.

"Come in. I'm not talking to you standing in the doorway."

"Does that mean you are okay?"

"I'm _obviously_ not okay, nitwit." She turned her back on him and went to her vanity, picking up a cotton ball and soaking it with makeup remover before swiping at the black marks under her eyes. "I'm so mad at you, you have no idea."

"But you let me in," he said, hesitating for a moment before closing the door behind him and standing in the middle of her room with his hands clasped. He could see her face in her mirror, and she aimed a half-hearted sneer at him before closing one eye to wipe off the remnants of her makeup.

"I want to know why you did it."

"Why I... ruined your wedding?"

" _Obviously_."

"Because I want to marry you myself! _Obviously_." Taking that tone of voice with her was dangerous, but Kinga just pursed her lips and looked at him silently through the mirror. "I didn't mean to kill Jonah. I know I ruined the experiment. I'm sorry for that. But you are so... so short-sighted, sometimes. What did you expect would happen if you forced someone who didn't love you to marry you? Did you think you'd ever really be happy with him? What's so—" Max's voice faltered. She turned around to look at him directly, and he forced the question out. "What's so wrong with me that my love for you isn't good enough to make you happy?"

"Nothing, really," Kinga said. "I never should have listened to Grandma when she told me not to marry a henchman. You're not equivalent to her weird alien lackeys. You're a human being with— with real feelings— feelings for me."

Max blinked. "There's... nothing wrong with me?"

"No."

"You're not going to call me stupid or make a fat joke or... anything mean?"

"No. Not right now, anyways." She pointed at her bed. "Sit down and give me a second." He did as he was told, quietly watching her remove the last of her makeup before staring at herself in the mirror for a long moment. She shook her head sharply and came to sit next to him on the bed. With her hair down and her face bare, she looked... younger, maybe, or more honest. He wasn't sure. "It's kind of romantic, I guess," she said.

"Killing your groom-to-be?"

"Stopping the wedding through whatever means necessary," she amended. "I just... I got very wrapped up in the idea of my ratings stunt wedding."

"Yeah, you were single-minded about it. I didn't know how to stop it except with drastic measures." Max looked down when Kinga put her hand on top of his, then looked back up at her with a question in his eyes.

"I don't really know why I brushed you off so hard," she said, and he shrugged.

"I don't look like a skinny space magician or an eight foot tall giraffe with glasses. You're big on appearances. I'm not..." He winced, not really wanting to finish the sentence.

"You're cute," she said. Max froze. "You're not like, OMG super hot, but you're, you know, kind of adorable."

"Really?"

"Yeah. We've just known each other so long that you're— I don't know. Comforting, I guess. Like my favorite teddy bear. Soft and reassuring and..." Lacing her fingers through his, she offered him a small smile. "There for me. You're always there for me. And I didn't really appreciate what that meant to me until you just knocked on my door. Anyone else would have run and hid. But you came to find me."

"It was really the only thing I could do."

"And that's why you're such a great second banana. Because you prioritize me like that, even in a moment like this." He didn't know what to say to that, so he just tugged their clasped hands up to kiss the back of hers. Her gaze softened immediately. "I make you miserable, don't I."

"I wouldn't use miserable as the adjective there," Max said. "You make me confused, you make me nervous, you make me feel worthless sometimes—"

"You're not worthless," she said instantly. "You are _not_ worthless. You're so necessary. I wouldn't be able to do any of this without you. The whole experiment wouldn't be possible without both of us working together."

All Max could do was grin. He'd half thought he'd have to die before she'd admit she needed him, but this was not even close to his death. This was giving him life.

"You could make me other things, you know," he said once he tamed his smile. "You could make me happy. You could make me fulfilled. You could make me feel like all my love for you wasn't an act of futility I'll never recover from."

"Is that what it's felt like?" Kinga's voice was so quiet he had to lean in to hear her. "Futility?"

"Up to this point? Yeah."

"But you didn't stop."

"No. How could I stop? You're the love of my life, that's not something I can just put down and get over."

Her cheeks flared pink, and her hand tightened on his. "Say that again."

Gently, Max disengaged his hand from hers and reached up to turn her to look at him. Her eyes were very wide. "Kinga Forrester... I love you. I've always loved you. I can't imagine loving anyone but you. It hurt me so much inside to see you marry someone else that I put lifeblood on my hands to prevent it from happening. And, you know what, even though I'm sad about Jonah, if he's the price that had to be paid to get you to really see how I feel about you, so be it."

"Oh, _Max_...." She surged forward to kiss him, extremely clumsily and rather forcefully and not quite on the mark, nearly bowling him over. He yelped in surprise, throwing a hand back to brace himself on the bed, and tilted his head to bring their mouths into alignment. He'd seen her put on her strawberry lip balm probably hundreds of times, but actually _tasting_ it on her lips was indescribably satisfying. "You're important to me," she murmured when their lips parted.

"Do you think you could love me?"

"As much as I can love anyone."

"You're not a sociopath. You're just crazy."

"Oh, very seductive," Kinga snorted, and Max's lips twitched.

"Am I allowed to try to be seductive? Because I could give it a much better attempt if you'd let me."

She eyed him and then smirked. "This I gotta see."

"Come here, then," he said, standing up and pulling her to her feet in front of him. He slid two fingers between the buttons of her black coat, and she inhaled sharply, chest rising under his touch. "Do you mind if I take this off of you?"

"Permission granted," she said, and he made short work of the buttons, peeling open the coat with a mixture of reverence and excitement and sliding it off her shoulders to hang it on the chair in front of her vanity, not daring to let her uniform get wrinkled in his eagerness to get it off of her. She lifted her chin when he turned back to her, and he smiled at her.

"You're so beautiful. And your uniform really does flatter you very well. But gosh, you have no idea how long I've been hoping to get you out of it." Max settled his hands on her waist and let out a dreamy sigh. "You look _really_ good in this shade of green, too. It sets off your hair so fantastically."

"Oh, yeah?" Kinga tossed her head and scattered her long copper hair over her shoulders and against the emerald green fabric of her collared shirt. "What else?"

"Sit back down." He knelt in front of her when she did as he requested, working open the laces of her tall boots, and she leaned back on her hands and smirked down at him.

"I like you on your knees for me. It's a good look for you."

"You have a dirty mind."

"That wasn't necessarily dirty."

"In the middle of a seduction attempt? Yeah, it was."

"Yeah, all right, it was," Kinga admitted, pointing her toes as he pulled off her left boot and put it under the bed. "I stand by what I said, though."

"I'm okay with that, honestly." Max skimmed his fingers up the back of her left calf and tickled the bend of her knee. She screeched and tried to kick him, not hard, just reflexively, but her socked foot didn't do much damage to his well-padded hip.

"Stop that!" He'd already stopped, though. He smiled up at her and she rolled her eyes. "You're not allowed to tickle me."

"Right now, or ever?" He expected a blanket ban, but she just huffed.

"Tickling is not seductive."

"Oh, I disagree. Making you laugh is so sexy, and you almost never laugh at my jokes, so if this is the only way I can do it..." He reached for her foot, and she kicked him again, but playfully gently this time.

"Get on with it, Max." Laughing, he turned his attention to unlacing her other boot. She watched him with a complicated expression on her face, a bemused happiness leavened with the weight of realization, and after a moment she reached out to run her fingers through his curls while he had his head bowed.

"That's nice," he said softly, not looking up at her. "I like that a lot." She sat up straight so she could do it with both hands, digging her fingers into his hair and scratching gently at his scalp. He shivered and paused with his fingers caught in her bootlaces. "It's so rare for you to touch me nicely."

"It doesn't have to be so rare."

"Well, that's up to you," he said, glancing up at her to find her smiling at him. "I'm definitely not going to object if you do it more frequently." He tossed the second boot under the bed with the first when he got it off her foot, crossed his arms on her knees, and put his head on them to look up at her through his lashes. "So how am I doing with being seductive?"

"Six out of ten, good but not great." Kinga gave his hair a gentle tug and let go of it, and Max bit his lip.

"Oh, ouch. Guess I have to step it up." He got back to his feet and leaned down to kiss her, soft and sweet in a stark contrast to how she'd kissed him first. "How open are you to losing more clothes?"

"I'm not okay with being the only one losing them," she said, reaching up to start working on the buttons of his uniform coat.

"Sure thing!" He shrugged it off when she undid the last button, and her hands went right to his sides to dig in with her fingertips. "Ack!" Max collapsed onto the bed next to her as she tickled him mercilessly, not even trying to defend himself, just helplessly giggling until she stopped.

"Huh. You were right. That _is_ sexy," Kinga said, and put her hands underneath his green turtleneck to start peeling it off of him, not tickling any more, just touching him nicely like he wanted her to do. He squirmed a little.

"Your hands are cold."

"Yeah, well, you're warm, so thanks for the temperature adjustment." He sat up a little to let her pull his shirt off, then took her hands in his and brought them up to kiss the backs of both of them. "You're good at the cute little gestures," she said. "I hope you're good at the big important things too."

"I'm completely open to criticism and suggestion on how to improve, if you don't think I am good at them." It seemed fair for him to start unbuttoning her shirt then, and she seemed to agree, arching her back a bit to present him with the buttons and a very nice look at her bra as he revealed it. "Oh... have I told you you're gorgeous in the past two minutes?"

"I'm not keeping track," she lied.

"You're breathtaking." He ran a thumb over the purple lace edging the black silk cups of her bra and added, "And so on point with your aesthetic."

"Thanks for noticing."

"Well, I'm assuming no one else is catching peeks of your bra to give you the compliment."

"Yeah, that's a pretty safe assumption to make." She shrugged out of her shirt and tossed it on the floor, then sat back slightly and looked him up and down. "So... are you a little nervous or is that just me?"

"That's a massive understatement. I'm... sixty percent eagerness and forty percent terror?"

"God, seriously? I'm not that scary, am I?"

"I'm less scared of you and more scared of disappointing you."

Kinga's eyes widened, and she leaned in to kiss him with a hand on his cheek. "That actually makes me feel less nervous," she said. "Weird. Take your pants off?"

"Uh... yes?" Max toed his shoes off and stood up to do as she asked, leaving him in a pair of boxers with seagulls printed on them and socks with a dinosaur pattern. She bit her lip and tried not to laugh.

"You and your weird socks," she said fondly, reaching out to squeeze his hips. "You're cute."

"Can I get yours off too? I mean, since we're in this together and all." She beckoned him closer with one finger and then lifted her hips off the bed to let him peel off her leggings, revealing matching black panties with purple lace trim. He let out a heartfelt sigh. "I know I'm not who you were intending to impress with this ensemble, but I'm still impressed."

"Honestly, you'll probably appreciate it more." For a second they both looked at each other, not certain how to proceed, and then Max shrugged and gently pushed her legs apart so he could kneel between them on the floor.

"I am going to warn you now... I read a _lot_ of romance novels, so even though I have virtually no practical experience, I do have a few ideas. So... let me know if I'm doing okay or you want me to do something differently," he said. She stared wide-eyed down at him as he leaned in to kiss her thighs and didn't say anything as his lips moved a little higher with every kiss. He paused to glance up at her when his lips brushed lace, and Kinga dug her fingers into his hair to turn his attention back downward.

"Don't stop." Never the type to disobey an order, especially not one he was so invested in fulfilling, Max let her pull him in and sighed warmly against the silk of her panties before putting his mouth on her through them, the fabric already damp against his lips before he dared to lick. "Oh!" Kinga sounded shocked, which was silly, since she was the one holding him too tightly for him to retreat. He could taste her faintly through the silk, but he had no reference point for comparison in his mind, no analogy he could make to describe her flavor, only tanginess on his tongue that he instantly needed a better taste of to satisfy his addiction to her.

Slowly, giving her plenty of opportunity to stop him, he slid a finger under the gusset of her panties to pull them aside, brushing against nothing but soft, hot skin. Well, she had thought this would be her wedding night, of course she would have primped for the occasion, and now he got to benefit from it. He didn't even look, just lapped at her and whimpered at her flavor bursting across his tongue.

"Oh, god, Max..." Her hand in his hair tightened painfully, but she pulled him in instead of pushing him away. Blindly, he tried to learn the complexities of her with nothing guiding him but hundreds of floridly written sex scenes out of every possible sub-genre of romance novels and his overeager mouth, but from her gasps and her continued grip on him, he couldn't be doing too bad a job of it.

By the time she whined at the back of her throat and pulled him back from her, he felt almost like he was drunk, intoxicated by her taste and the broken little sounds she made for him. He blinked up at her, and she ran a fingertip over his parted lips. "Why'd you stop me?"

"Because I want these stupid panties off of me and you underneath me."

" _Oh_!" Kinga smirked as Max bounded to his feet and then hesitated. "Uh, I'm supposed to be naked at that point, right?"

" _Yes_ , Max."

"Just making sure!" She rolled her eyes as he tugged the panties down her legs and then leaned forward to divest him of his boxers, flirting her fingers over his erection for a fleeting moment.

"Come on, marshmallow fluff, let's get on the same page here. I was always intending to cash in my V-card tonight." He froze, and she frowned at him. " _What_?"

"You've never done this before?" He sounded strangled.

"No. Have you?"

"No. Me either."

Kinga bit her lip and stared at him for a moment, then patted the bed next to her. "Well, there's no one I'd rather awkwardly fumble through this with than you."

"I love you so much that it's almost incapacitating." He got on the bed next to her, and she sat up on her knees, still looking him over with curiosity and maybe a little anxiety. "Could you maybe lose the bra, too?"

"What, don't you like it?" She arched her back a little, and he smiled.

"It's cute, but I'd rather see you naked."

"That's fair," she said, reaching behind herself to unhook it before flinging it off the bed. He made a desperate sound and leaned up to catch one of her nipples in his mouth, and she yelped. "Oh... do that with your teeth," she demanded, and purred when he did as he was told. "Oh, that's _good_."

Happy to follow orders, Max switched breasts and repeated the maneuver to a very appreciative sound, and he would have been happy to keep at it if she hadn't pushed him flat on his back after a few moments. "Is this the part where you take advantage of me?" he asked breathlessly, and she smirked down at him as she straddled his hips, hair falling over her shoulders and hanging down to almost veil them both from everything that wasn’t each other.

"Yeah. That's this part. You good?"

"I don't think I've ever been better."

"Yeah, well, get back to me about that in a minute," she said, and guided him into her with a definitive shift of her hips.

" _Oh_!" If asked later, Kinga would say that Max made the sound, while he would swear it was her who did it. In reality, they both cried out, and she braced herself above him with her hands on his shoulders, both of them stunned into stillness by the open look on each other's faces. Her legs trembled around his hips, and he rubbed her thighs, gentle and reassuring.

"Are you okay?" he managed after a moment, and she nodded slowly. "Really?"

" _Yes_ ," she said, digging her nails into his shoulders. His eyes went wide but he didn't complain, and after a moment she lifted one hand to cup his cheek. "Sorry. I'm— I'm fine. It's just weird."

"This isn't weird for me," he said. "This is literally my dreams coming true."

"Oh, it's not weird _at all_ for you to be f-fucking me..." She faltered on the word, and he shook his head.

"Weird isn't the word." He caressed her hips, and added, "and I wouldn't use that word for what we're doing. Making love, yeah, but..."

"Hopeless romantic," she accused, but his sentimentality broke through her momentary hesitation and she started to move atop him, slowly at first, faster when he gasped and looked up at her like he was watching fireworks, awed and enraptured by the pleasure washing over her expression. He reached between them, blindly seeking around with his thumb until he tripped over that spot that made her jaw drop with a cry and then focusing on it single-mindedly.

They raced each other to the finish, a brief headlong dash into bliss. Kinga crossed the line first with a yell they could probably hear all the way out to the surface of the moon, going weak and trembly above him. Max thrust up into her a couple more times and followed her over the edge much more quietly, just a whimper of her name that rang through her mind like a clarion bell.

She didn’t move from atop him, wrapping her arms around him and burying her face in his shoulder as the tremors ran their course through her. He rubbed one hand slowly up and down her spine, perfectly content to be her pillow as long as she cared to make use of him as such, and for a few minutes that was all, her breath hot against his throat and his hand on her back, wrapped up in each other’s embrace.

“This changes everything,” she said when she lifted her head. He blinked up at her.

“Does it?”

“Well, _yeah_. Doesn’t it?”

“Only if you’re willing to admit that something happened to anyone else,” he said, and she rolled her eyes. 

“What, are you afraid I won’t own up to you in public?”

“Can you tell me I’m not right to be afraid of that?”

“No,” she admitted, and he smirked.

“I know you, Kinga. I know what you’re like. I know you way too well for you to pretend that I don’t.”

“You want me to tell people? I’ll tell this whole damn moon base. I’ll put it in the daily newsletter if it’ll make you happy. ‘Guess what, suckers, Max and I were meant to be.’ Would that be good enough for you?”

“It’s a start,” he said, and reached up to tuck her hair behind her ear. “But will you admit we’re together on the show?”

“What show? Our test subject is dead. You killed him.”

“Shit, I forgot about that for a minute.”

“But if we catch another idiot, yeah. I’ll tell the world, if that’s what you want.”

“More than anything.”

“Fine. If that’s what it’ll take to make you happy, I’ll do it.” She leaned down to kiss him as if to seal a promise, and then blinked at him from only a couple of inches away. “God, you look so happy right now and I haven’t even done it yet.”

“I’m going to hold you to it,” he said. “If you don’t say it, I will.”

“Fine! I’m not going to back out of this,” she said, and instead of saying _yeah, you probably will_ , he just leaned up to kiss her back.

He knew what she was like. But he wasn’t going to hesitate to say it if she didn’t own up to him first.


End file.
